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For the past several years, the concept of “the consumerization of IT” has been used to define the challenge that CIOs are facing when trying to manage the chaos resulting from consumer devices encroaching into the workplace. iPass doesn’t believe that consumerization of IT adequately describes the sea change going on in the workplace. Deeper changes are arising that will affect how employees will be managed and measured, and how business will be conducted. More importantly, these changes will impact the role of IT as an organization – representing both a major challenge and an opportunity for today’s enterprises.
Today’s employees are blending work and consumer tasks seamlessly. A mobile worker sits in a Starbucks working on a writing project. She doesn’t want to be distracted, so she only has two applications open on her laptop (word processing and a browser for quick research). At the same time, she has her smartphone at hand notifying her when work email arrives. She checks her work email, and then checks her personal email, then goes to Facebook. A friend on Facebook has just posted a link to his blog covering an interesting management issue. She reads his blog, which helps her clarify a point on her work project. Were her various computing activities personal, professional or a mix of both? It is hard to tell since she has easily moved back and forth between the two worlds.
This quarter’s iPass Mobile Workforce survey revealed that 5.5 percent of employees used their mobile phone/smartphones exclusively for work and only 3 percent used them only for personal communications. Most employees used them for a combination of both. Also, 7.1 percent of mobile employees carried two separate phones – one for just work and one for personal use.
The mobile device has now become a tether that creates an on-demand workforce – always at the ready to handle work or personal business. Even while on vacation, a mere 5.9 percent of employees completely disconnected and 36.3 percent said that they were always connected. The majority of mobile employees who connected while on vacation did so for work. An on-demand workforce delivers huge benefits to the enterprise in the area of increased workforce productivity as well as in customer service, crisis management and day-to-day operations. It also allows employees to stay connected with their personal and professional communities.
As workers mix personal and business activities, measuring productivity of remote employees has become a challenge. How should productivity be measured for an employee who frequently works remotely? Who takes off at 4 pm to coach their child’s sports team, who attends staff meetings while commuting, and who considers end-of-day to mean midnight? As a result of this ambiguity, there will be a shift in how organizations will measure productivity going forward. It is still unclear how to measure mobile productivity effectively, but most analysts believe it will be easier than in the past. According to Seth Siegel, a director at Deloitte Consulting LLP:
“On the productivity side, the measures can be trickier. Though many organizations value “soft” benefits like improved morale and better work-life balance, the hard-nosed finance types want to see real performance improvements. They want to know that workers are getting their work done more effectively – and that they’re not going to soccer games or doing laundry. Fortunately, early leaders in workplace innovation offer plenty of good advice about the most important metrics – and how to track them. They’ve been able to demonstrate that performance measurement in a web-enabled environment can be easier to manage than in the good old days of punch cards and time clocks. Indeed, their efforts have been able to provide good evidence to suggest that workers who have the freedom to work from anywhere at any time often do just that – logging in more hours and getting more accomplished than their counterparts who come into the office every day.”[i]
One of the issues with the consumerization of IT is that the assumption is made that there is a significant technical difference between a consumer and a business device. Take for example, Apple’s iPad. An analyst recently conveyed that he misjudged the iPad when it was first introduced. In recent discussions with business customers, the analyst was amazed at how seriously businesses were evaluating the iPad or tablet devices for employees. This quarter’s iPass survey confirmed this observation. According to survey results, 16.3 percent of mobile employees had an iPad or tablet PC device, and an additional 33.2 percent planned to purchase or receive one in the next six months. A surprising 59.8 percent of those planned to use it for work. iPass believes that Apple must evolve the iPad to better meet the needs of the enterprise or other vendors will essentially copy the form factor and tailor it to the business environment.
Whether a device is targeted to the consumer or to a business user is largely dependent on the applications that are most often used. And even these lines are not drawn clearly. iPass survey results found that people used most applications for both work and personal use.
iPass believes that the new mobile workforce productivity market will mature in the next five years with robust tools for managing the proliferation of devices, measuring productivity and return, structuring liability, mitigating risk, ensuring access, maintaining a level of control and containing costs. These challenges are not new to IT, but will become exacerbated with increased mobility and the proliferation of cloud computing.
Mobile broadband networks, multi-use devices and cloud computing have forced businesses to move from the protection of their own private networks to the unsecured open range. Employees now move transparently between the corporate network, campus roaming, public and private Wi-Fi, broadband and their home networks. They access data centers in the cloud that bypass the company’s outmoded VPN and store privileged business information on their unsecured mobile devices. IDC recently estimated that 70 percent or more of enterprise data now resides in some form on mobile devices, and remarkably, approximately three out of four organizations lack comprehensive formalized policies for dealing with mobile devices and data.[ii]
For IT, the old security model of building a moat around the data center has broken down. IT can no longer enforce a safe perimeter around their employees and the company’s assets. While cloud computing is still early on the adoption curve, it is hard to find a CIO who doesn’t have a cloud strategy. According to InformationWeek’s July 2010 Cloud and IT Staffing Survey:
Three-fifths of strategic IT managers responding to our survey say their companies have either adopted cloud services or plan to within the next 24 months. By contrast, only about one-third of IT staff say this is the case. That doesn’t mean we just happened to survey IT staff and middle managers in companies that are less likely than average to be moving functions to the public cloud. Rather, cloud providers really are targeting line-of-business executives, who in turn are insisting that their CIOs evaluate these services and adopt where they make business sense. The word may not have trickled down just yet, but all operational managers and staff should be thinking about the cloud’s long-term impact on their roles.[iii]
In the world of networks without borders, IT now needs to be even more focused on managing risk and not losing sight of containing costs. The IT managers of the future will need real-time information to access and optimize their networks, and will need to address the question of how to secure a device they do not own.
At the same time, as more users and data-intensive applications shift outside the LAN, carriers have responded by moving away from flat rate data plans to usage-based data plans. Of course there is more and more free Wi-Fi available, but when choice is presented to the user, 34.8 percent of those surveyed admitted to gravitating to the easiest route for connectivity – even if it was not the most cost effective. IT managers will need to ensure that their users stay productive without incurring unnecessary costs.
[ii] IDC, “Worldwide Mobile Security 2009–2013 Forecast and Analysis,” April 2009
[iii] InformationWeek, “Changing Role of IT as Services Ascend,” July 10, 2010
